PIRANHAS: PrIvacy-Preserving Remote Attestation in Non-Hierarchical Asynchronous Swarms
Jonas Hofmann
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2026 · Day 2 · Privacy Systems
Philip (presenting for Jonas Hofmann) from CISPA introduces PIRANHAS, the first **fully anonymous swarm attestation scheme** that supports any network topology, is non-interactive, and publicly verifiable. Remote attestation verifies that IoT devices run untampered firmware before trusting them with sensitive data. Existing swarm attestation schemes require fixed hierarchies or topologies and leak device identifiers, enabling tracking. PIRANHAS uses **recursive zero-knowledge SNARKs** to aggregate attestation proofs across arbitrary swarm topologies, achieving an aggregation runtime of only **356 milliseconds per device** on a consumer laptop (using Plonky2) and verification in approximately **50 milliseconds** regardless of swarm size. The framework transforms any symmetric-key remote attestation scheme into an anonymous, publicly verifiable variant while maintaining constant proof size and verification time as the swarm scales.
AI review
A clean cryptographic construction that achieves the first fully anonymous swarm attestation with any-topology support using recursive ZK-SNARKs. The 356ms per-device aggregation and 50ms verification on Raspberry Pi are practical numbers. Not offensive research, but the anonymous attestation primitive could be useful for verifying device integrity in adversarial environments without revealing fleet composition.